MIA > Archive > Foster > Syndicalism
The American workingman who arouses himself from the customary state of indifference characterizing workingmen and gazes about him in a critical mood, must be struck by the great inequalities in the conditions of the beings surrounding him.
On the one hand, he sees vast masses of workers working long hours, often at the most dangerous and unhealthy occupations, and getting in return hardly the scantiest of the necessities of life. He sees this starving, slaving mass of workers afflicted with the terrible social scourges of the unemployment, crime, prostitution, lunacy, consumption, and all the other forms of social, mental and physical degeneracy which are the inseparable companions of poverty.
On the other hand, he sees a comparatively small number of idle rich revelling in all the luxuries that modern society can produce. Though they do nothing useful for society, society pours its vast treasures into their laps, and they squander this wealth in every way that their depraved and sated appetites can suggest. The monkey dinners, dog suppers, pig luncheons, hiring of noblemen for servants, buying of princes for husbands and cartloads of valuable art treasures for notoriety, and the thousand and one other insane methods of the American aristocracy to flaunt its wealth are too well known to need recapitulation here. Our observing workers must indeed conclude that something is radically wrong in a society that produces such extremes of poverty and wealth, and toil and idleness.
His inquiries as to the cause of these inequalities are met by a shower of answers from retainers of the rich. He is told that they are due to the trusts, the tariff, to the fact that the workers don’t “save”, that they “drink”, that they are unfit to survive in the great social struggle for the survival of the fittest from which the rich have emerged as victors, etc., etc. But even the slightest examination of these answers will show their superficiality and inability to explain the great inequalities in our modern society.
Poverty with its terrible co-evils and wealth with its luxuries are not caused by the trusts or the tariff. They are to be found in all the industrial countries alike, whether they have trusts or tariffs or not.
Neither are they caused by the workers “squandering” their wages in “drink” and the rich “saving up”. A few years ago it was shown that the yearly wages of the anthracite coal miners amounted to $40.00 less than the cost of the actual necessities of life. It has been recently calculated that the street railway workers of Chicago receive wages enough to buy only two-thirds of the necessities of life. The same is true, of every category of workers. Even if the workers spent not a cent for drink they couldn’t “save,” as they would still want for prime necessities. And even if a worker expended nothing of the two dollars per day average wages he received, and “saved” it all for 2,000 years, his savings at the end of that time would amount to but a fraction of the fabulous sums amassed by American multi-millionaires in a few years while revelling in luxury. To say that the workers are poor because they “drink” and don’t “save” is absurd.
The argument that the rich are rich because they are capable and the poor are poor because they are incapable is belied everywhere. Thousands of wealthy stockholders are drawing dividends from industries they have never even seen — let alone to know anything of them or their operation. A goodly share of this interest-drawing aristocracy — if not the majority — is composed of perverts and mental degenerates of various types, such as the Thaw and McCormick heirs of malodorous renown. To say that these degenerates and the mediocre balance of the aristocracy occupy their present positions of affluence because of their superior capacities is to insult common intelligence.
The fallacies of the various other orthodox explanations for the social inequalities and their terrible effects will at once be apparent to the intelligent inquiring worker. He must seek deeper for the true explanation. He will find it in the wages system, which is the foundation institution of modern society.
The Wages System.— The means whereby society gains its livelihood: the shops, mills, mines, railroads, etc., are owned by the comparatively few individuals. The rest of society, in order to work in the industries and procure a living, must secure the permission of these individuals. As the number of applicants for jobs is far greater than the needs of the industries, there is such competition for the available positions that those who secure them are, in return for the privilege to earn a living, forced to give up to the owners of the industries the lion’s share (in the United States four-fifths) of the abundant products the highly developed machinery enables them to produce. The owners of the industries take advantage of their strategic position and steal the greater portion of the workers’ product, giving them, in the shape of wages, barely enough to live on.
The wages system of robbery is responsible for the great extremes of poverty and wealth to be found in modern society. It has existed ever since the very beginning of industrialism and its effects grow worse daily. Every invention of a labor-saving device, by increasing the army of the unemployed and making the competition for jobs keener, enables the owners of the industries to more thoroughly exploit their slaves. Thus the wages system has the effect of making inventions of labor-saving devices curses to the bulk of society, instead of blessings as they should be.
The Revolution.— The wages system is the most brazen and gigantic robbery ever perpetrated since the world began. So disastrous are its consequences on the vast armies of slaves within its toils that it is threatening the very existence of society. If society is even to be perpetuated — to say nothing of being organized upon an equitable basis — the wages system must be abolished. The thieves at present in control of the industries must be stripped of their booty, and society so reorganized that every individual shall have free access to the social means of production. This social reorganization will be a revolution. Only after such a revolution will the great inequalities of modern society disappear.
The Class Struggle.— For years progressive workers have realized the necessity for this revolution. They have also realized that it must be brought about by the workers themselves.
The wages system has divided the immense bulk of society into two classes — the capitalist class and the working class. The interests of these two classes are radically opposed to each other. It is the interest of the capitalist class to rob the workers of as much of their product as possible and the interest of the workers to prevent this robbery as far as they can. A guerrilla warfare — known as the class struggle and evidenced by the many strikes, working class political eruptions and the many acts of oppression committed by capitalists upon their workers — constantly goes on between these opposing classes. The capitalists, who are heartlessness and cupidity personified, being the dominant class of society and the shapers of its institutions, have organized the whole fabric of society with a view to keeping the working class in slavery. It is, therefore, evident that if the workers are to become free it must be through their own efforts and directly against those of the capitalists. Hence the revolutionary slogan, “The emancipation of the workers must be wrought by the workers themselves.”
Rejection of Political Action and Acceptance of Direct Action.— It goes without saying, that for the workers to overthrow capitalism they must be thoroughly organized to exert their combined might. Ever since the inception of the revolutionary idea the necessity for this organization has been realized by progressive workingmen and they have expended untold efforts to bring it about.
These efforts have been almost entirely directed into the building of working class political parties to capture the State — it being believed that with such a party in control of the State, the latter could be used to expropriate the capitalists. The Socialist parties in the various countries have been laboriously built with this idea in view. But of late years, among revolutionists, there has been a pronounced revolution against this program. Working class political action is rapidly coming to be recognized as even worse than useless. It is being superseded by the direct action[1] of the labor unions.
This rejection of political action and acceptance of direct action has been caused by the failure of the former and the success of the latter. Working class political parties, in spite of the great efforts spent upon them, have been distinct failures, while, on the other hand, labor unions, though often despised and considered as interlopers by revolutionists, have been pronounced successes. For a long time, practically unnoticed, they went on all over the world winning the most substantial victories for the working class. It was only the continued failure of political action that led revolutionists to study them and to make a dispassionate comparison of their achievements, possibilities, structure, etc., with those of the working class political party. The result of this study is the growing rejection of political action and the rapid development of the revolutionary labor unions, or Syndicalist movement, which is attracting the attention of the whole world.
In the following pages the various phases of this new movement, designed to free the working class, will be discussed.
[1] This much-maligned term means simply the direct warfare — peaceful or violent, as the case may be — or the workers upon their employers, to the exclusion or all third parties, such as politicians, etc.
Last updated on 20 March 2023